In Cameroon, parents don't name their babies right away. When I told this to a friend in the US, she exclaimed, 'What a good idea! They get to know the baby first, so they can choose a name that fits!" That isn't why Cameroonian parents wait, but it works for my blog.

Monday, November 14, 2011

This photo was taken from our front drive. In the foreground you see one of our dog kennels and the wall. (See the broken glass on top? That's where the rooster perched. Now you know why I yelled "ouch.") In the background you can see a large white building, which is the Xaviera hotel. The high school sometimes holds its end-of-year banquet there. Lots of people hold parties there, and they usually make a lot more noise and last far later into the night than the banquet, but that's a subject for another post. Behind the hotel (to the upper left of the hotel in the photo) you see another white building, with a red roof. That is where Coneilia works as a cook for one of the dorms where some of the high schoolers live. And if you look very carefully to the front of those buildings,, you can see the steep road that runs past them. This morning Coneilia called me. (I didn't answer but called her right back, because here we pay per call, and only the person who initiates the call pays. Most people just call, let it ring once, then hang up, expecting us to call them back. But Coneilia never presumes anything.) She was very excited, saying that she was climbing the hill on her way to work and wanted to know if I could see her. I went out in my yard and looked, and for the next few minutes we sounded a lot like that Verizon commercial, only we were saying, "Can you see me now?" When she finally came past the big tree and into sight, we both waved like mad for several minutes, then she said, "Now I'm late to work and have to run!"